My life and the world around me

Shortly after departing for Japan, my site was hacked. I’ve gone around and around with my web host, which has been unwilling to reactivate a compromised site–which I can understand, but they also haven’t exactly been johnny-on-the-spot about helping me to secure it. For the moment, at least, it’s live again.

Gwen and I returned from Japan last night. We had a ball over there. More on this later.

Condolences. My site was hacked about two months ago…not the ultra-simple site I maintain for business purposes, but a site with a message board and several other CGI apps that I provide for my extended family (parents, eight siblings, several siblings-in-law, nephews, neices…about 20 people total). Someone found a couple of directories that I had left world-writable, and had installed some nasty hacking apps (steal passwords, backdoor to root, etc).

The webhost provider said they’d delete my entire site and I’d then have to reinstall from a backup, which fortunately I had made less than a week earlier. So it wasn’t a big deal.